Guest editorial: California's death penalty is dead

Richard Ramirez is dead. The serial killer dubbed the Night Stalker was the face of evil for many Southern Californians. And he was the face of something else -- the futility of this state's system of capital punishment.

Ramirez was 25 when he was captured in 1985. He was 53 when he died Friday morning at San Quentin State Prison. So he lived most of his life with the death penalty hanging over him but never getting even that sterile version of the satanic horror he perpetrated on 13 murder victims.

In one article from the recent archives, a legal expert was quoted as saying in 2010 that Ramirez's case was "only about halfway through the appeals process" and calculated that meant he would be in his 70s before his execution would be carried out.

You might say that, by dying of natural causes, Ramirez beat the system.

The system itself was on Death Row last November when California voters considered Proposition 34, which would have ended the death penalty in the state and converted the sentences of Death Row inmates to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The argument, a good one, was that it was costing the state more than $100 million a year on legal battles and Death Row incarceration.

Yet since the state resumed executions in 1992, only 13 condemned convicts have actually been put to death, while more than 700 others continue to sit in prison; as of last fall, 84 Death Row inmates had died of natural causes.

Voters defeated Proposition 34, and the death penalty survived -- though, in name only.

Last month, a state appeals court expanded the death penalty's legal limbo by striking down California's latest attempt to update its legal injection procedures, ruling that prison officials flouted administrative rules when they crafted new regulations.

And so capital punishment continues to be on hold here, even though it's what Californians want for criminals like Ramirez.

Voters made it clear when passing Proposition 34 that they want to keep the death penalty. But if the state is going to keep it, leaders must fix a broken system by streamlining the appeals process and moving to a single-drug protocol for lethal injections.